Usual news this morning: Palestine arrests terrorist suspects, and
Israel says that's not enough; Pakistan arrests terrorist suspects,
and India says that's not enough; U.S. bombs convoy of tribal
leaders in Afghanistan, says they thought they were Taliban.
But then there's this puff piece called "Bush's rookie year a
success." I stewed for a while, then fired this note off to
The Wichita Eagle:

Bush's rookie year a success? Well, he's certainly accomplished
a lot: a war that is projected to be endless and that provides
Israel and India an excuse to step up their own wars; an economy
in the toilet, with rising unemployment; tax cuts to the rich,
and bailouts to big business (although not enough to save his
buddies at Enron); the end of the surplus that supposedly had
been necessary to keep Social Security solvent; an assault on our
legal system which has safeguarded our freedom for over 200 years;
and not the least bit of attention to skyrocketing health care
costs; and, of course, more damage to the environment. I'm just
not sure how much Bush success we can really afford.

The list, of course, could have gone on and on, but in tallying
it up so far I'm struck by how huge these calamities really are,
and how hard it was less than a year ago to predict so much
damage so soon. Equally amazing is how little attention people
here seem to be paying.

The Village Voice did a set of articles under the rubric of "A Lefty
New Year: Reviving Left Influence in a Time of Rampant Reaction." I
didn't read much of this, but what I did read seemed long on protest
and short on ideas. Take the union piece for example: some good
points about the value of work, but the bottom line is 13% -- that's
the current measure of unionization in the U.S. workforce. Predictably,
the push is to organize more, but let's suspend disbelief for a moment
and ask what happens if herculean efforts push the figure up to, what?,
15%. Not much of a difference. Hell, double the unionization figure --
that'd just about get you back to the '50s -- and you still wind up
with a situation where unions have no direct bearing on the lives of
three out of every four workers. I think it's obvious that if unions
ever hope to have any role in American life other than being a special
interest group for a semi-lucky few, you have to start looking at
doing something for the non-union 87%. I've always believed in unions,
but I've never worked where there was a union or even a union movement,
so I've never been represented by anything more than my own wits.
Could I have ever used a helping hand? Damn straight! Damn near
everyone can use a helping hand.

The Voice featured two war pieces, one anti, but the other more/less pro.
The latter was written by longtime friend Robert Christgau, provocatively
titled "Wanted: A Protest Movement for Progressive Hawks." I lost some
sleep over this, but ultimately the argument doesn't amount to much.
As a movement it is hopelessly compromised. It won't impress the war
establishment, whose main concern is to reassert America's symbolically
tarnished superpowerdom. Its argument is equally wasted on those of
us who do believe in peace, since we also believe that all that the
Progressive Hawks wish to protest is in fact the work of war. And it's
hard to see any fertile middle ground that would be more impressed by,
say, Hawks for Civil Liberties, than by a broad-based coalition that
focuses on simple questions, like is limiting this or that civil liberty
really necessary even in a world vulnerable to terrorism? As for Hawks
for Feeding People Displaced by War, enough said.

The rhetoric can also be dispensed with. Hawk seems to have two shades
of meaning. One is the preoccupation that hawks have for attacking
doves, which is often all they do. The other is the core belief that
good things can come from the application of military force. The latter
point does not totally lack historical justification -- primarily in
the form of tyrants who seem unable to accept "no" in any other form.
Yet every case I can think of where war winds up looking remotely good
is littered with previous failures to address serious grievances. Take
Nazi Germany. The appeasements are often cited as a failure of the will
to go to war against evil, but evil was there to be challenged long
before Germany marched into Czechoslovakia, or Austria, or even the
Rhine. And really, evil (in this case racism and anticommunism) much
preceded the Nazis -- had such evil been effectively opposed by the
generation before, and had WW I been settled (or better, not fought)
more constructively, would the Nazis ever taken root? (A highly
rhetorical point, I admit, given that the WW I generation was led
by virulent racists and anticommunists like Woodrow Wilson and David
Lloyd George -- talk about Progressive Hawks!)

But the word that worries me most is Progressive -- both as historical
reference and as political agenda. Progressivism was but a historical
moment -- the notion that technological progress would complete man's
domination of nature, and that business and political organizations
would have to evolve to make that domination more reasonable and fair.
There are some good ideas in the progressive agenda -- antitrust, in
particular, is worth resuscitating -- but the key idea of forcing
nature has run into limits: more and more we find ourselves trying
to figure out how to live with nature rather than simply dominating it.
Also more muddled now is the notion of progress and especially the
direction of progress, especially when one moves beyond technology
and into culture and economics.

But there are more problems with "progressive hawkism" than just poor
choice of rhetoric. These include:

A tendency to greatly exaggerate the threat of terrorism, and to
react in ways that amplify the effectiveness of terrorism.

The view that we (U.S. citizens) have common interests distinct
from the rest of the world, and that we can trust the Bush
administration to protect and further those interests.

The view that similar acts done by different groups for allegedly
different reasons should be judged differently. (E.g., I've read
that terrorist bombing is worse than U.S./Israeli bombing because
the former deliberately targets civilians, whereas the latter
only kills civilians by accident.)

A deep-seated belief that force works, that force can be used
for good effect.

One could add more to the list, but I'm not doing a good job either
of representing Bob's views or of containing my critique to them.
This seems much like the second coming of the Cold War Liberals:
pro-New Deal, pro-Civil Rights, anti-Communist, ideological apologists
for the Vietnam War. It seems to be a fallacy that intellectuals are
particularly prone to: the arrogance that they can re-arrange the
world to fit their ideals, and the foolishness to think that the
people who hold power will be so smitten by their fealty that they
will be allowed to exercise power. The Liberals got nothing for their
efforts -- the war only strengthened the warmongers and their conservative
cohorts, while the New Left was invented to exclude them. IMHO, much
the same fate awaits Progressive Hawks.

One thing that happened after Sept. 11 was that all sorts of people
crawled out of the woodwork with their own special agendas. E.g., I
recall a well-known Gun Nut asserting that the only way the hijackings
were possible was because law-abiding gun-toters weren't allowed
to pack heat on airplanes. Among these people, the 900 lb. gorilla
was the U.S. military -- a lazy but dangerous group that has been
so hard-up to justify itself that it's tried to peddle a missile
defense fantasy for the past 20+ years. This fit Bush's political
agenda much more than it fit the problem, but the only skill the
U.S. military has is bombing, so it quickly led to the absurdity
of bombing caves with B-52s, while promoting local gangsters as
our proxy ground troops.

I keep this file open, but days seem to pass by without me ever
noticing it. Christmas has come and gone -- hardly amounts to much
since my folks died. Mike came back from NJ for a couple of days.
We fixed Indonesian food one night
(Ayam Bali,
Nasi Goreng), and
I showed Mike how I make
peanut sauce.

I know I said I may stop trying to do movie reviews, but I got
roped into this movie, and someone's gotta pay for it:

Movie: Ocean's Eleven. Not as offensive as the
other overhyped criminal superhero movies, basically because it
squanders so little talent that it's hardly worth the effort it
would take to hate it. The rotten core is the menage à trois
between George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Andy Garcia -- beats
me what any of them sees in each other, but such shallowness is
never easy to fathom. The balance of the movie is little more than
a technological obstacle course. Of course the crooks scale the
course with just enough aplomb to fill out two hours. Of course
they get away with the loot -- America has come a long way since
movies were required to admonish that crime doesn't pay. Little
pays these days but crime. C-

Spent a good deal of Saturday typing down artist names from All
Music Guide to Electronica. Got a lot of 1000 names with ****
or better albums. Looked up a bunch of them on AMG, and added those
with ****(*) or better. This pushed my estimated Techno/Electronica
coverage down from 36% to 22%. The likelihood that I'll get my
coverage back up to 36% is pretty slim; the 50% that I think is
pretty good coverage is a pipe dream at best. I like the music,
but making distinctions amongst it is hard, and buying broadly
just isn't in the economic cards these days. As I recall, I wasn't
able to recognize 10% of the artists in Drum 'n' Bass: The Rough
Guide when I first looked at it; I may be up to 35% or so, but
way below where I'd be even on rap (where I think my 69% is way
overblown, but I have 220 rap records rated vs. 57 electronica).
I also have T.J.'s list:
of 30 records, I own two, own other records by two others, hadn't
heard of well more than half. I'm working on this; hard to say if
I'm making progress.

Spent most of Sunday trying to sift out an outline for a record
guide. The idea would be to lay out a map of the interesting parts
of the musical universe, at least from my own singular viewpoint.
Having a single viewpoint promises some coherency (unlike, e.g.,
AMG), but also ensures uneven coverage (too much groundwork, even
if one's ears were up to it) and a strong likelihood that few
people will share my taste or trust my judgments. So why do it?
Too early to tell, but chances are it's just for me: a slice of
autobiography, an exercise of thought, a chance to create a
pretty picture. IOW, it would be art. Some rough numbers: I have
approx. 1000 A/A+ records rated (out of 7000 total, pretty damn
generous). Some of these would be weeded out as duplicates (e.g.,
go with the larger of the two A+ Coasters anthologies), but some
A- records are worth writing up. Say I write 150 words on each,
that's 150,000 words, a decent sized book. Slightly less than
50% are rock (broadly speaking); another 25% are jazz; the rest
are scattered, with country, blues, reggae, and African in pretty
comprehensive shape.

Let's talk about something else. I had been adding short journal
entries when I saw movies. I think the last one was Ghost World.
Since then I've seen three movies: one worthy of comment, the other
two more deserving of derision. Working backwards:

Heist is yet another of a seemingly endless stream of
movies featuring (usually reluctant) super-crooks. Soderbergh's
Oceans 11 opens today, promsing more of the same. But
this is Mamet, so we also have to endure more double crosses
and sleight-of-hand tricks than I can keep track of, much less
give a damn. C+

Mulholland Drive sure looked like good ole film noir,
but whereas much of the pleasure of detective art is to resolve
complexity into truth and understanding, David Lynch gives us
nothing but confusion. I've read critics chirping about how this
shifts into parallel universes, but such shifts as do appear
do little more than negate the preceding story. Sooner or later
all this negation sums up to . . . nothing. C

Apocalypse Now Redux: The extra scenes add weight, nuance,
and pacing to Coppolla's Vietnam-as-descent-into-hell flick, but
the metaphors haven't aged well. Or maybe I'm just less tolerant
of artistic license since the history and lessons of the Vietnam
war seem to be slipping ever further from our grasp. For instance,
we seem to have reduced the tragedy of Vietnam to a single watchword:
quagmire, omnipresent here in the encroaching, smothering jungle.
But the movie is enough a piece of its time that if you remember
the time, you can piece it back together again. The main problem
for the US was distinguishing friend from foe; two such lines
were drawn, a theoretical one by the politicians, and an arbitrary
one by US firepower, each compromising the other. Deeper was the
cultural dissonance -- the movie spotlights beachboy consumerism
and the hardened special forces warriors, but from every facet of
American poltical culture you could see a distorted image of Vietnam.
The quagmire in Vietnam was not the jungle: it was the contradiction
of destroying villages to save them, the impossibility of military
and political and socioeconomic success, and ultimately the damage
done to America's own capacity for moral reasoning. Until we come
to grips with what was profoundly wrong in America's Vietnam war
we will remain prisoners of our delusions. Coppolla doesn't really
help us here. A-

We also watched 1999's James Bond tramp, The World Is Not Enough,
on TV. What a relief: terrorism so absurd you could laugh at it, or
more likely snicker. Bad writing. Worse acting. Ridiculous action
sequences. Bad science. Lame technology. Giggly sex. It was a hoot.
B-

Old news, but it looks like the anthrax threat which so effectively
pushed up US paranoia to grease the skids for Bush's Afghan adventure
was done with US government-made anthrax. Without getting into the
question of who mailed the anthrax, or why, one conclusion is obvious:
the terror would not exist had the US military not developed the weapon.
Which is to say that at least in this case terrorism could have been
prevented by the simple, sensible policy of governments not developing
terrorist weapons.

It is insane that anyone could justify development of biological weapons
as a valid military (let alone "defense" -- they do call it the Department
of Defense) weapon. The obvious problem is that is that it is impossible
to aim or time-limit disease organisms. (Not that the US is able to aim
its bombs all that accurately, but at least they only go off once, and
somewhere in the neighborhood of their intended target.) On the other
hand, as we've seen, anthrax can be an effective terrorist weapon.
Maybe that's why the US developed it?

I hate the "weapons of mass destruction" euphemism. Three things: 1) It
conflates nuclear weapons (which are the real standard by which we measure
mass destruction) with chemical and biological weapons that effect their
destruction in incomparable ways, which makes it all the harder to see
the differences. 2) It amplifies people's fears of chem/bio attacks,
which in turn makes their threat more effective and attractive to
terrorists. 3) It sanitizes the weapons, making them seem legitimate
for the US to have while only illegitimate for terrorists. A much more
appropriate grouping phrase would be "weapons of criminal irresponsibility."
What all these weapons have in common that they are indiscriminate and
have potentially longlasting effects. The inability to properly target
them makes it crazy to deploy them -- for the exception that proves the
rule we need only note that the one place Nazi Germany did deploy poison
gas during WWII was in closed rooms full of Jews.

For many years the US justified its nuclear arsenal as deterrence against
other nations' nuclear arsenals. That theory depended on a fundamental
symmetry with other threatening nations. That symmetry breaks down with
terrorist groups, and the breakdown fundamentally alters the logic of
keeping such fundamentally irresponsible weapons: against the "benefit"
of defense-by-deterrence we have to weigh the risk that such weapons
could fall into the hands of terrorists. What is that risk? Well, in
the anthrax case it has already happened. (If you fancy the theory
that the US government planted the anthrax as some sort of hair-brained
innoculation program, you probably think the US government is the
world's biggest terrorist anyway.)

More war news: chalk up another big day for the bomb people over the
bystanders. Israel's tactic of trying to "motivate" Arafat by bombing
his habitual hangouts reminds me of nothing so much as one of those
westerns where the sadistic outlaw shouts "dance!" as he shoots around
the feet of some schlemiel. How can anyone, much less the nominal
leader of a nation, function under such conditions? The only sensible
thing Arafat can do under the circumstances would be to dissolve his
organization and go into exile, removing his person as an issue. The
smart thing would be to go one step further, and denounce jihad and
its attendant terrorism as a viable strategy to secure human rights
for Palestinians living under Israel's suzerainty. For if anything is
clear, it is that terrorism is a desperate act which plays to the worst
impulses of those in power.

One thing that is especially disheartening here is that Israel's
targeting of Arafat comes on the heels of meetings between Sharon
and the US government. Whereas the early post-9/11 hope was that
the US would moderate Israel in the hopes of gaining much needed
Islamic support against Al Qaeda, it now looks like the 9/11 glee
evinced by the likes of Peres and Netanyahu has prevailed. Israel
indeed has much to teach the US about terrorism: specifically, how
terrorist threats provide cover and excuse for the most vicious and
reactionary of political agendas. But it also puts US actions in
the harshest of light: Given how popular it would be in the US to
assassinate Osama Bin Laden, how can we fault Israel for its
assassination program? Given that the US adjudged Mullah Omar
culpable for not handing Bin Laden over, how can we fault Israel
for condemning Arafat? Given that the US routinely bombs innocent
bystanders in the name of protecting its security, how can we
fault Israel for the same. We have in fact given Israel a green
light to wreak unlimited havoc, and it's hard to imagine that
the world will not give the US more credit than we'd really like
for Israel's actions.

This matters little to our cynical allies in Israel. After all,
they've lived and breathed war for 50 years; perhaps they wouldn't
know what to do with themselves otherwise? The fact that the level
of hate there has never been higher has a reassuring continuity
to it. But one wonders how long this show will play to rapt
audiences in middle America. While the US government has engaged
in foreign wars almost continuously since 1942, those wars have
had very little impact on everyday life here. WWII was a big
pep rally -- tough on the soldiers, but a boom for everyone
else. The anticommunist crusades were minor distractions on
TV, and the mercenary thing against Iraq was little more than
one of those short-lived smash hits. But girding for an endless
threat of terrorism, and enduring the endless hassles of prying,
sinister government, is something that's likely to grow tired.

But the bigger question will be how to move beyond the cycle of
terrorism and repression, and give peace a chance. Were Arafat
to do that, to just walk away condemning both sets of bombers,
would be a noble (or Nobel) move. But the only Nobel-worthy
prize this year is for war: let's share this one between Osama
Bin Laden and Ariel Sharon. And hope that George Bush isn't
still in the running come next year.

Resolution: write more. As a minimal step, I'll just keep this file
open. Try to jot down passing thoughts.

Hendrik Hertzberg's New Yorker comment (Dec. 3, 2001) was among
the most annoying things I've read about the Afghan war:

One way in which this conflict is indeed different is that there is
no antiwar movement to speak of. [ . . . ] Apart from traditional
pacifists, who oppose any use of force on principle, and a tiny
handful of reflexive Rip Van Winkles, almost no one objects, in
broad outline, to the aims and methods of the antiterrorism campaign.

I'm not sure which one of these diminutive and deprecated groups I
belong to, but it isn't hard or unreasonable to find objections to
either aims or methods in the US's "antiterrorism campaign." The aim
is clearly to contain terrorism by repression. More basically, this
means that the aim is to reassert the inevitability and indomitability
of US global power. The campaign we're witnessing is the reflex of
power provoked. But the methods do little more than remind us that
the US's real power doesn't amount to much more than the ability to
indiscriminately bomb and wreak havoc, to unleash terror at a pitch
that Al Qaeda can only dream about.

In this, the US leadership has managed to reverse the plain truth of
the 9/11 attacks, which is that the victims had no relationship to
any plausible complaint about the US or how the US power has damaged
any other part of the world, and that the terrorists had shown
themselves to be utterly immoral in their slaughter of innocents.
Hertzberg is right that no one disagrees with this judgment of the
terrorists. Where he misses the boat is in not realizing that the
same logic that lets the US leaders justify their bombing in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and other quarters of the Islamic world, is
the selfsame logic that leads terrorists, with their relatively
crude weapons, to target US innocents. And while in the US people
like Hertzberg are grinning over laundered news about US military
success in Afghanistan, the even more hardened government/terrorist
factions in Israel have viciously expanded their own power tryst.

The bottom line is that the logic of terrorism and repression, the
indifference and contempt for the lives and liberties of innocents,
is the common denominator for terrorists and repressive powers alike.
They need each other to justify themselves, in effect they are each
other. But why on earth do we need either of them?

Quoting Hertzberg again:

The truth is that no one anticipated the extraordinary military
gains of the past two weeks, and no one can know what the next
two weeks -- or two months, or two years -- will bring.

Actually, the military gains seem pretty straightforward. The US
pressured Pakistan and Saudi Arabia into stopping the arms flow
to the Taliban, so the Taliban withdrew. The sad story of Afghanistan
is that for more than 20 years now civil war has been funded by
other countries shipping arms and supplies to anyone willing to
fight. Cut off those arms supplies and the civil war has to dry
up.

I've never thought of myself as a pacifist -- I don't have the
instincts, and I don't have the faith. But I hate it when the media
dump on them: experience has shown that their instincts are usually
right, while the instincts of the warriors rarely give us anything
but more war. And when that becomes ridiculously obvious, we'll
need all the pacifists we can find.